Friday, April 17, 2009

Chapter 14 - The School Curriculum: Development and Design

When making a curriculum, there are four questions that need to be asked and answered: 1. Who initiates the curriculum? 2. Who determines properties? 3. Who implements the curriculum? 4. Who is responsible for what happens? There are three major curriculum developments, and they are the following: prescriptive perspective, deliberative perspective, and critical perspective. The prescriptive perspective is the technical production perspective, where the curriculum planning is viewed as an objective, linear process. Planning its curriculum is a four-stop process. You start by identifying the purpose, aims, and goals. Next you identify and select the learning experiences. After this you organize the learning experiences, and then finish off with the evaluation. The descriptive perspective is the deliberative perspective that focuses on how curriculum decision making occurs in practice. This curriculum decision making happens in three phases: platform, deliberation, design. The critical perspective is the artistic perspective that views curriculum decision making as embodying educational imagination and transformation. The development of this curriculum is consensus building. It has an emphasis on learning events that are meaningful, has a need for deliberation in establishing priorities, has multiple modes of presentation and takes into consideration a nonlinear, cross-curriculum content organization. There are six different curriculum designs: 1. Subject-area (essentialism) 2. Integrated 3. Core (perennalism) 4. Student-centered (progressivism) 5. Constructivism (progressivism, social reconstructivism, postmodernism) 6. Social justice (social reconstructivism, postmodernism) Each of these curriculum designs have similarities and differences. Different forces that can influence the curriculum are the national curriculum standards, textbooks, mandated assessments, state governments, teachers, local school boards, parent and community groups, as well as the federal government.